The Sunday Reset: Week 4 of 47

Three weeks ago I published forty-seven lessons. Last week I wrote a fair warning.

This week I started telling the truth. Not the polished version. Not the one where I look good.

I didn't know how hard it would be. I thought I'd just tell the story. But telling the truth about your own collapse is different from writing lessons about it. The lessons are clean. The story is messy.

Monday, Super Bowl Sunday. Two cop cars in the driveway on the nicest February day Michigan had all year, neighbors out in their yards. A holding cell with a bench and a toilet and nobody telling me the charges. Paying my own booking fee the next day and still getting no answer. A week of hell in which nothing happened. Great Wolf Lodge with friends a couple weeks later, having real fun with a real weight behind my eyes.

Also in Monday's episode: December. A detective called me about the check, I told him a client paid me for work and sent him the invoice and everything we produced, and then I heard nothing for two months. I decided the silence meant it was over. Silence isn't an answer.

Wednesday, The Waiting. COVID closed the courts and my case went in a drawer. Quarantine, cancelled spring break, a week in Pentwater, masks in the fall. Then an offer: attempted uttering and publishing, pay back the check, no jail time. I told my attorney I hadn't knowingly done anything. He said I didn't have enough evidence and recommended I take it. So I did, in September or October of 2020.

I've learned since that you never take the first offer on the table. Nobody told me that then.

And I didn't tell Carol.

A few weeks later the pre-sentencing report came back. No jail time, one year probation, pay back the check, sentencing in January 2021. I had the exit in my hands and said nothing.

Friday, The Lie. I pushed sentencing from January to March. The Sunday before, a client called to say his office had COVID. I called my attorney, he said he'd handle it, go get tested. Negative. The court said he still had to show. The judge issued a bench warrant.

My attorney told me to lay low. I asked if that was the best thing. He said yes.

So I did, for ten months. Phoenix. Pentwater for the summer. Florida for our anniversary. Disney at Christmas. Living like nothing was wrong, looking over my shoulder the whole time.

Most people think the fall is the arrest. Or the bench warrant. Or the knock on the door.

It isn't. The fall is the lie you tell yourself before any of that happens. It's the belief that you can outrun your own story if you just keep moving. The vacations, the dinners, the looking over your shoulder while telling everyone it's fine.

The arrest is just when you hit the ground.

So the question this week isn't what did Dan do. It's what are you currently outrunning, and how long have you been calling it something else.

One. Not knowing is not protection. It has the exact texture of protection. As long as you don't open the envelope the number isn't real yet. But you pay anyway, in sleep and in the gap between how loud it is inside and how fine it looks outside. Just in a currency nobody can see, which means nobody can help you carry it.

Two. A pause is interest accruing. Nothing improved while my case sat in a drawer. The silence I was keeping didn't get shorter. The conversation I owed didn't get easier. Every month I added a second thing to explain, which was that I'd known for another month.

Three. Asking one person is not counsel. I did this twice with the same man. He said take the plea, and I took it. He said lay low, and I did, for ten months. Both times I got off the phone quick, before he could revise it. When somebody tells you what you don't want to hear you argue and push back and go check. When somebody tells you what you want to hear, you pocket it. Speed of acceptance is the tell.

Guilt is doing something wrong and regretting it. Shame is feeling like a loser and wondering what I am even doing here.

Guilt points at a behavior. It has a next step built in. It says that was wrong, go fix it, here's what fixing it looks like. Uncomfortable, and it moves you.

Shame points at you. Not I did a bad thing. I am a bad thing. And shame doesn't move you, it freezes you, because if the problem is what you are there's nothing to fix and nowhere to go. So you stay put and hide.

In the fall of 2020 I didn't have a guilt problem. I had a guilt situation and a shame response. Guilt would have told me to tell her, take the sentence, pay the money, start over. Painful and survivable. Shame told me that if she knew what I was, it was over.

I took shame's advice for two more years.

Worth being precise about what the guilt was actually for, because this week clarified it for me. It wasn't the check. I got paid for work and deposited a payment. The guilt is the two years after: the plea I didn't mention, the sentencing I skipped, the warrant I sat on, the vacations I performed. That's a long enough list without borrowing one that isn't mine.

Grace is what breaks that. Not the greeting card version. Grace isn't saying it was fine, because it wasn't, and anything that erases the harm is denial with better branding.

Grace lets you look straight at what you did without concluding it's the sum total of what you are. It stands in the gap between the thing you did and the person you are and keeps them from collapsing into each other. Because the second they collapse you've got nothing left to work with.

Grace doesn't let you off the hook. It keeps you conscious while you're on it.

Write one sentence naming the thing you're carrying. It has to have a verb in it, and the verb has to be something you did or didn't do.

If you can write it, that's guilt. Guilt you can work with, and the next step is usually a conversation you already know you owe somebody.

If it keeps coming out as a sentence about what you are, that's shame, and shame has one move.

Then the harder half. Tell one person the sentence. Not the internet. One person who's earned it.

Week 4 of 47: twenty-five touches, daily walk, daily workout, three podcasts, one newsletter.

The story doesn't change the floor. That's the entire point of having one. On a week where I sat down and recorded the worst year of my life three separate times, the floor is what got me to Sunday.

What's your floor this week?

One step, one day. Grace over guilt.

A note on the walk and the workout: I'm not a doctor and none of this is medical advice. What works for my body after knee surgery may not be right for yours. Talk to an actual professional before starting or changing anything.